Estimating Demand for Aggressive Play: The Case of English Premier League Football

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Abstract

This study estimates a demand curve for physically aggressive play in the English Premier Football League (EPL), the highest level of professional association football (soccer) in England. Employing a league-point-maximization framework in which a team chooses its level of aggressive play as an input, optimum aggressive play is assumed to respond to its price, where price is the reduction in the probability of a win or a tie resulting from aggressive play. The results indicate that aggressive play by EPL teams, as measured by total disciplinary points, is responsive to opportunity cost for both the home and away teams in a given match, although the responsiveness of the away team is shown to be much larger than that of the home team. Therefore, EPL teams can be expected to respond to policies that are designed to reduce aggressive play through increases in the cost of such behavior, and such policies can be expected to influence the behavior of away teams more than home teams. If fans of EPL football have preferences for less aggressive play, then the league may be able to increase revenues by reducing aggression through increases in opportunity cost.

The purpose of FIFA's in-match penalties is to promote fair play, punish violent play that may lead to player injury, and generally negate any advantage that misconduct may accrue to the guilty player or team. From the perspective of an economist, the penalties also serve as an incentive mechanism; specifically, the penalty associated with a given foul is the "price" that must be paid for committing said infraction.When fouls and misconduct are beneficial to a team or player, penalties reduce the net benefit of such behavior. Under an assumption of rationality on the part of players and teams, infractions with higher prices (i.e., greater punishments) and lower payoffs will be committed less frequently. Such rational behavior in response to the price of misconduct in football is essentially an application of the law of demand; specifically, more of a good (misconduct) will be consumed at lower prices of that good, all else equal.

The current study attempts to estimate a demand curve for in-match misconduct in the English Premier Football League (EPL), the highest level of professional club football in England. The EPL has the reputation as a league in which physically aggressive play is part of the culture, where the game is generally played "hard but fair." Physically aggressive play is considered to be a tactic that, if employed well, can increase the ability of a team of lesser skill to compete with more highly-skilled teams. For example, the London-based club Arsenal has a reputation, whether deserved or not, of being a team composed of players that do not like playing against teams with a physically aggressive style of play, indicating that aggressive play can improve a team's chances of winning against Arsenal. …